A Great and Sleepless Weekend

This has been a fantastic weekend, even though I feel like I spent the whole time awake. Still lingering in sickness but slowly crawling out, I spent most of the nights coughing up my lungs and trying to breathe without my nose.

Friday I picked up the BUFF postcards and came home to hammer out some final notes on the Holly Hox shoot the next day. John and I fell asleep late, and somehow managed to continue arguing as we slept. I have no idea, I just remember talking and being angry without really processing how or why. We sort of get on these bickering streaks sometimes, it's just dumb stuff that doesn't really affect us emotionally. There's just a lot going on now, with the potential move to DC and the job hunt and the BFA and the wedding. We feel the weight of everything, definitely. But we keep each other around.

Saturday morning we drug ourselves out of bed, made a hasty pot of coffee and headed for Allston. My friend Caity invited me to dinner that night, and in a miraculous stroke of convenience, she lives with Nate, who is in the Holly Hox band. We had the shoot during the day and then hung out all night with beers. They are all people I don't see nearly enough.

Woke up this morning surprisingly hung over (3 beers?). Made some coffee and got to work cleaning the house like mad. Between my full time job and John's, um, indifference, the mess started piling up until it reached epic, war-zone proportions. I really wanted to get to the BUFF meeting today, but we ran completely out of time and had to start setting up for the evening Holly Hox shoot, as well as getting the food ready for dinner.

Five people over for dinner, crammed in our little kitchen over vegetarian coq-au-vin (keep an eye out for it on John's blog). When they left, I couldn't help myself, I started cutting the Holly Hox footage together. It looks great, which makes me really happy, and makes me feel confident for once. I haven't made anything of my own in a while, and though this is being done for someone else, it's to the same effect. Mirror Men has been my only self-contained project, really, in an extremely long time.

Now I have to work on the BUFF calendar a little, see if there's something I can go to tomorrow night (probably at the Milky Way if you kids want to join me), and write Anna Feder an email. It's three in the morning, I have work tomorrow, and I'm dog tired but I honestly don't want to sleep. I want to make more coffee and keep going. I really want to do well at everything I've got in my hands right now. I guess we'll see.

Festival Madness

The Boston Underground Film Festival is going to be awesome this year. Please do go! I'm going around to events in Boston with these postcards, so I might as well drop one on my blog.

It'll be March 19th through the 26th, and I'll post a notice when the site has listed a program schedule. From what I know and what I've seen of the programming though, it's really great and wet and awful and sometimes thinky-thinky.

(Card design by Bryan McKay, I'm 95% sure).

I'm going to be on the ground at a lot of the parties during the fest, and John is going to be doing videography, probably with an awesome dude named Dave. So, you know, sexy times.

And while I'm at it, if any of you are presumably coming to my wedding in Oct, and you want to do a performance or a vid or artwork or whatever, shoot me an email. I'll make a folder for it.

The Blessings and Burdens of Local Media:

I love NPR. Adore it. That is the true godsend of my day job. I realized that I can happily carry on in the most mundane tasks if I have a steady stream of public talk radio in my ear. Where normally I would have gotten my daily dose of current events from skimming the metro on the T on the way to work each morning, now I get more streamlined information virtually all day long on a myriad of subjects: politics, history, science, opinion, the arts, anything I want.

All public media outlets like NPR and PBS are extremely, inexpressibly valuable to our cultural welfare. On a national level, there is virtually no qualitative difference between these and commercial stations (I mean in terms of production value - I prefer the content of public media). I only wish that local public stations were...how to put this sensitively...better. But of course that defeats the purpose of being public, doesn't it?

Not necessarily. The problem inherent in public access stations is that, when you let anyone do anything they want, the quality of programming goes so far down hill that no one watches the channel. Community or Public Access is amazing in theory, but usually fizzles in practice. I'm not suggesting that we restrict people or programs, no no no. That is what I love about public access. I think every municipality should have an open TV station, just like a library. Media technology is at the heart of mass information in this society, and we need to keep up, teach people how to be active participants, or at least literate viewers. No one really acknowledges how important that is.

A few years ago I was a production intern at Somerville Community Access. They were pretty happening as far as that sort of thing goes. I loved Critical Focus, which, despite understandably low production value, was always smart and earnest and engaging. I just wish I could take moments and shows like that, including shows which are really fully about the community, and grow them to occupy a larger time slot. Because the truth is, you turn on most local access TV and it's a near incomprehensible mumble of people who simply don't know how to use the medium. So no one ends up watching even the good stuff.

I've got no clear answers to how to fix this, and it's probably arguable that we should leave well enough alone. I certainly don't think we should restrict member's abilities to air programs based on quality; that defeats the very foundation of membership. However, I suspect that everyone who cares enough to submit programming would also care enough to make it good, so the problem of quality could be solved in a more grassroots manner. I think people ought to be trained better, and I think youth-produced programs should be more integral. I think people should really pro-actively pursue a means of filling up what is literally dead time (by which I mean the endless rotary of lime-green announcements with elevator music), with real, quality, intelligent, provocative television.

Here we have, in our hands, the golden means by which media can be produced without FCC interference, corporate control, commercial obligations, and large special interest agendas disconnected from the needs and concerns of real people in the community. Here we have the perfect outlet for real interaction, real education, unbiased (or totally biased) interpretations, free education, and just about the most unrestricted speech you can put on the screen. SCAT let any member or resident bring in programming and it would get aired. You could show virtually anything, and that is amazing. Why aren't more people taking advantage?

It also concerns me because pressures are mounting on these little stations. As far as I know, institutions like NPR and PBS are safe for the time being. But local programming, which in my mind is theoretically more awesome than national broadcasting, is feeling the weight of big conglomerate cable providers who no longer have to compete and thus no longer see the need to fund such trivial pursuits.

Even your local news affiliate is almost certainly controlled by New Corp., which not only owns a strikingly large share of global media, but is controlled by a strikingly small number of people. And lets just say Rupert isn't exactly a paragon of journalistic integrity. So if people don't start recognizing this, don't start truly engaging with the blessing that is public media, then they won't even notice when it's taken away from them.

I guess that's just what I'm worried about.